mondo cinema and beyond 1960s — 1980s
summarized the situation thusly: “Our culture divides people into two classes: civilized men, a title bestowed on the persons who do the classifying; and others, who have only the human form, who may perish or go to the dogs for all the ‘civilized men’ care.” Tis is the privilege of history’s winners, although as Gore Vidal was fond of pointing out, most of those Europeans touting their civilization weren’t the descendants of Roman senators or Hellenistic philosophers but of barbaric, bloodthirsty Picts, Gauls, and Celts.
Almost as soon as the concept of civilization had taken hold in the Western imagination, its first discontents began to appear. Among them were French satirist Voltaire and the Swiss-born philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose doctrine of “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” was an enormous influence on many of the United States of America’s Founding Fathers. A somewhat leery relationship with civilization would be one of the defining characteristics of the young nation’s first artistic harvest, from the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper to the back-to-nature transcendentalism preached by Ralph Waldo Emerson and practiced by Henry David Toreau. In 1842, shortly before Toreau set up shop at Walden Pond, a 22-year-old American seaman named Herman Melville and a shipmate named Toby disembarked from the whaling vessel Achushnet on Nuku Hiva in the Marquesas Islands, and spent four months among the tattoos and taboos of the Typee tribe, feared throughout the South Pacific—their name, we are informed, “signifies a lover of human flesh.”
Melville’s memoir of this period, titled for the tribe
and generously padded with borrowed and fanciful material, would be published in 1846 and establish his literary reputation. Troughout Typee Melville observes “the wide difference between the extreme of savage
neither/nor
11
and civilized life,” though rarely to extol the latter. “In a primitive state of society,” he writes, “the enjoyments of life, though few and simple, are spread over a great extent, and are unalloyed.” Anticipating criticism of the Typees’ continuing practice of cannibalism, Melville contrasts the “mere eating of human flesh” to the “barbarity that custom which only a few years since was practised in enlightened England: — a convicted traitor, perhaps a man found guilty of honesty, patriotism, and
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